The Everyday Hunter®

Welcome to the host site for outdoor writer Steve Sorensen’s “Everyday Hunter” columns. For a complete index of all columns, go to EverydayHunter.com.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Five Reasons Why Poachers Are Not Hunters

by Steve Sorensen (Originally published in the Warren Times Observer, September 28, 2013.)

What is a poacher? Historically, a poacher was from a low socio-economic class in Europe, where wealthy landowners were considered to own the animals that roamed their land. When a hungry peasant would occasionally kill an animal for food, that peasant was called a poacher. Poaching was a serious crime against a landowner.

The actions of poachers don’t bear the scrutiny of public view.

The word “poach” comes from the
Middle English word “pocchen,” which literally means to enclose in a pouch, or
to “bag” something. The idea is to hide what one has taken.

In this country during the
Great Depression when game laws were not yet widely respected, many people poached
because they felt the laws were unjust. In those days, a game warden might occasionally
look the other way when he knew a family was hungry and had no other
alternative.

Many hunters today are
sympathetic with that motivation, but with so many government food programs and
a variety of agencies that provide food, including venison donation programs,
hunger is no excuse for poaching.

But poaching continues because
poachers have a variety of other motivations. Some poachers kill for pride. Some
poachers kill for certain body parts that have a value on the black market. Some
do it because they disagree with hunting regulations. Some make poaching a game
of outsmarting game wardens. Some poach purely for the pleasure of killing.

In the late 20th
century environmental scientists began applying the word “poach” to the illegal
harvest of plant species, so even the innocent picking of wildflowers could in
some cases be considered poaching. When the definition is broadened, its
application to game animals is weakened.

That may be why
few people accept such a broad application of the word, and most still connect
poaching primarily with game animals. Some mistakenly equate hunters with
poachers, but poachers are not hunters. Here’s why?

1.Poachers
don’t abide by laws that govern hunters. Hunting and conservation laws have
a long and strong history. Hunters during the early 20th century
created a wildlife conservation system that has no room for the idea of
poaching. The system of enforcing game laws is respected by hunters, but not by
poachers.

2.Poachers aren’t self-limiting as hunters are. Hunters have limits,
and they want limits. When a hunter attaches a tag to an animal, he is well
aware of the limit and he accepts it. He recognizes that it’s illicit to try to
use that tag again. He has successfully made a harvest, and recognizes that to
attempt to use that tag again is a selfish act. The poacher doesn’t care that
he’s selfish.

3.The methods of poachers are unacceptable to hunters. Most hunting
regulations are created at the state level, so state game agencies stipulate
what methods of harvest are legal. Hunters accept those regulations and
methods. Poachers do not. Poachers use weapons that are not legal for hunting,
think nothing of taking animals outside the legal dates or hours stipulated for
harvesting a species, and take animals that are illegal to hunt – even
threatened and endangered species for which there is no open season.

4.Poachers steal from hunters and from the population at large. In
North America, wildlife is not owned by those who own the land it lives on. Nor
is it owned by those licensed to hunt it. Until it is killed, it’s owned by the
people at large, and to kill an animal illegally is to steal from them.
Properly licensed hunters are not stealing when they use the methods and
weapons sanctioned for hunting, and hunt within the stipulated seasons and
times.

5.As thieves, poachers operate in a covert way. This relates to the
origin of the word “poach,” to hide in a pouch. The actions of poachers don’t
bear the scrutiny of public view, so poachers must hide their kills and
manipulate the facts and circumstances when they take an animal to a butcher or
a taxidermist, or display it on the wall. No hunter needs to hide his kill, and
hunters can be honest about the facts of the kill.

Hunters are a healthy and necessary part of wildlife conservation.
Poachers are destructive to it. Poaching
is not hunting, and poachers are not hunters any more than bank robbers are a
bank’s customers.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Why Hunter Stereotypes Are False

by Steve Sorensen (Originally published in the Warren Times Observer, September 14, 2013.)

People like to categorize people. That impulse
may be negative, coming from our inclination to create stereotypes of others.
Or it may be positive, coming from our God-given urge to name things.

The five stages of hunters – not one of them is bad.

In
Genesis 2:19-20, God gave man the responsibility for naming the animals, “Now
the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the
birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them;
and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man
gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild
animals.” That tells us it’s human nature to classify things, organize things,
and catalog things – all in an effort to create order.

Some
people categorize hunters. Some extremists are motivated to pigeonhole all
hunters as poachers, murderers, even sociopaths. One of their favorite words is
“slobs,” and they use it as often as possible. Others make a genuine attempt to
understand hunters. They recognize hunting’s positive aspects, and don’t attach
disapproving adjectives to the word “hunter.”

Between
1975 and 1980 Dr. Robert Jackson and Dr. Robert Norton from the University of
Wisconsin, LaCrosse campus, studied more than 1000 hunters and their theory of
hunter development has become widely accepted. It’s cited often in hunter
education classes and hunter behavior research. They identified five stages
deer hunters tend to pass through during a lifetime of hunting.

1.Shooting
Stage – When starting out, hunters want to pull the trigger as often as
possible. Success is defined primarily as kills.

2.Limiting
Out Stage – The hunter defines success in terms of numbers. He wants to
harvest as many deer as is legally possible and keeps track of things such as
consecutive years of harvests.

3.Trophy
Stage – Quality becomes more important than quantity, and quality is
defined in terms of trophy game animals. A trophy is not necessarily judged by
size. And the definition of a trophy does not diminish what the hunter
harvested at earlier stages. It might even be defined by the experience of the
hunt. The hunter now draws on knowledge acquired in the earlier stages. The
hunter is also beginning to see himself as a manager of a wildlife resource.

4.Method
Stage – The hunter becomes more focused on methods. He becomes more
strategic and focuses on his skills and understanding deer behavior. His
stories are less about his kills and more about the methods that produced an
opportunity. He may begin restricting himself to primitive weapons.

5.Sportsman
Stage – Others have called this the reflective stage, and even the
philosophical stage. The hunter has a broad view of hunting and focuses on
sharing it with others. He tends to view quality as what goes into habitat and
all that the habitat supports, and he is concerned about the preservation of
hunting for future generations.

Those
five ways of classifying hunters probably fit people best who start hunting at
an early age, and continue hunting for a lifetime. It doesn’t assume hunters
quickly transition through the stages, and all hunters might not progress
through all of them.

Given
these five stages, I make the following seven observations:

The stages may be similar for any enthusiast of
any activity. Stamp collectors, for example, probably have their parallel.

These stages do not define a hierarchy of moral
values, as none of them is bad. We don’t fault a beginning hunter for being in
the Shooting Stage nor do we say a hunter in the Sportsman Stage is morally
superior.

Hunters are often part of a peer group, and peer
groups have influence. If a hunter has only peers who are in one stage, he
might not move to another stage until his peer group changes.

Since these are defined as “stages,” they imply
growth. There is no clear line between one and another. Thus, each hunter is
unique, and no stereotype of hunters reflects reality.

Not only are hunters all unique, they all change
through their careers.

Anti-hunting propaganda fails to recognize that
all hunters are different, and it attacks hunters based on stereotypes and
caricatures.

All five stages describe legal, ethical hunters
and leave no room to consider poachers as being in the ranks of hunters.